Isotropic

My About page currently states “I plan on actually producing content in 2008, lol”. You may wonder why I bother. Steve Yegge’s You Should Write Blogs (even if nobody reads them) probably contributed to pushing me over the edge, so for convenience, you can blame him.
I’m calling this a half-year review despite the [...]

The Supreme Court of the United States, in 554 U. S. ____ (2008) DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA v. HELLER [PDF], has said (quoting from the syllabus (headnote) of the Opinion):
The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, [...]

Totally tubular, man! Robots for teh Intertubes.
In the main, today’s robots are not that clever [to inspect pipes and shafts]. They cannot climb or navigate in vertical pipes – and very few have active joints. Cybernetics and optical measurement scientists at SINTEF are working on a solution.
SINTEF (2008, June 27). Robot That [...]

I sometimes have to deal with laptop hard disks, either transferring contents to a new disk, diagnosing problems, or repairing file structures.
For several years I’ve used an IDE adapter a friend gave me. I don’t remember the circumstances, just that he happened to have it with him and I needed one right away. [...]

A few days ago iGoogle linked to an old photo of the lengthly (full letter-size page) instructions someone had taped to an office vending machine. I wanted to reference it here because it was quite funny, but unfortunately I’ve wiped out my browsing history since then and can’t find it, even after an [...]

According to Hannah Hickey, in Underwater communication: Robofish are the ultimate in ocean robots, keeping in touch without scientists’ help (University of Washington), “The Robofish pack’s first assignment, beginning this summer, will be to trail a remote-controlled toy shark.”.
Robofish are unique in that that they can coordinate their activities and, due to underwater inter-communication, [...]

You know you’re having a bad day when…
Good: Let’s go SCUBA diving!
Bad: Yikes, we’ve been swept into shark-infested waters!
Good: Hey, an island …
Bad: … infested with Komodo Dragons!
The full story is here.
h/t: Greg Ladenimage: Markofjohnson, KomodoDragonRinca1.jpg, Wikimedia Commons

The significance and formatting of whitespace in source code is a religious issue. Essentially, that means that opinions and intense personal preferences far outweigh any rational thoughts on the matter. That said, here’s my contribution to all the noise and furor.
Some of you may remember column-sensitive programming languages like RPG and FORTRAN, where [...]

This article at NewScientist, Malicious software threatens internet economy, by Colin Barras & Tom Simonite, summarizes an OECD report: Malware: A security threat to the Internet economy (PDF). I’ve selected a few items from the summary:

most malware infections (93%) occur on home users’ computers
around one in four personal computers in the US – [...]

I’m always inordinately delighted by interesting phrases (Ooh, shiny!). So much so that I’ll make a post just so I can reference the phrases. That isn’t to say that the posts I link to aren’t interesting in themselves — I didn’t find them while actually looking for quotes, after all. I’m [...]